Feb 15 to Apr 26, 2020
To Make an Auspicious Home
About the Exhibition
In her first project as the Varley Art Gallery of Markham’s 2020 Community-Artist-in-Residence, Annie Wong explores a nuanced sense of nostalgia and cultural survival embodied by the everyday objects specific to the making of a Chinese home. These objects range from kitchen staples, such as dried ingredients typical of Chinese soups, to collections of traditional folk art of the kind that proliferated among Chinese communities during the early waves of immigration to Canada.
Borrowed from local residents in Markham and beyond, the objects here perform a type of diasporic Canadian “Chineseness,” despite or distinctively because of, their Western context.
About the Artist
Annie Wong is a writer and multidisciplinary artist working in performance and installation. Her work begins at the intersections of the poetic and political in the matrix of everyday life, employing socially-engaged and process-oriented methods of artistic collaboration often with everyday people. Conceptually diverse, her current research explores embodied and affective knowledge from the anger of BIPOC feminist histories and the melancholy of diasporic hauntologies. Wong has presented research and projects across North America with Open Source Gallery (NY, New York), The Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON), Studio XX (Montreal, QC), Third Space (Saint John, NB), Intersite: Visual Arts Festival (Calgary, AB), among others. She has held residencies at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax, NS), The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, AL), and most recently with the City of Calgary. Wong’s literary practice includes poetry, art writing, and non-fiction. Her writing can be found in C Magazine, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Canadian Art, Performance Research Journal (UK), and MICE Magazine.
